A Computer Science Linked-courses Learning Community

Abstract

Previous work has shown that factors such as student engagement and involvement can impact progress for computer science majors. One promising approach for improving student engagement is learning communities, which have a long history in academia but are relatively uncommon in computing. In this article we describe a linked-courses learning community for women and men of color majoring in development-focused computing degrees. We provide logistical information about the first offering of the learning community and assess the effectiveness of the community via a student survey. Our results show that students in the learning community are more likely to report that they have support for success in computer science courses and that they are a part of a community of programmers.

Micro-Classes

“…As such, programs for women and ethnic minority students have focused on building community-centered learning groups [1,2]. More recently, work has explored using supplementary learning communities to increase student retention and success in CS [7,16]. Our study builds on this work by studying the benefit of the micro-class design for building community in a large class in the context of high CS enrollments.…”